“Just think! Three quarters of Shakespeare is so written, so is Klopstock’s _Messiah_. Byron used it, and lately I read a translation of _Julius Cæsar_ that ran perfectly, although you had prepared me to be utterly shocked. “So my subject appeals to you? It is new, grand and fertile, so imagine into it all that you like. As far as the music is concerned I am exploring a virgin Brazilian forest and great are the treasures I hope to find.” XX NAPLES--HOME Again did that wretched malady--call it moral, nervous, imaginary, what you will, _I_ call it spleen--which is really the fever of loneliness, seize upon me. I had first felt it at La Côte Saint-André, when I was sixteen. One lovely May morning I was sitting in a meadow, under the shade of a spreading oak, reading Montjoie’s _Manuscript found at Posilippo_. Engrossed in my story, I only gradually became aware of sweet and plaintive songs trembling in the breeze. It was the Rogation procession; in the old time-honoured way, that has always seemed to me most poetical and touching, the peasants were going round the fields, praying for the blessing of heaven on their crops. I watched them kneel before a green-wreathed wooden cross, while the priest blessed the land, then they passed on, and the sweet voices died in the distance. Silence--the gentle rustling of the flowering wheat, the faint cry of the quail to his mate, a dead leaf floating from an oak, the deep throbbing of my own heart. Life seemed so very far away! On the horizon the Alpine glaciers shone in the rising sun. Here was Meylan; far over those mountains lay Italy, Naples, Posilippo--the whole world of my story. Oh! for the wings of a dove, to leave this clogging earth-bound body! Oh! for life at its highest and best; for love, for rapture, for ecstasy; for the clinging clasp of hot embraces! Love! glory! where is my bright particular star, O my heart? my Stella Montis? Gone for ever? Then came the crisis with crushing force. I suffered horribly, rolling on the earth, spreading wide my empty arms, tearing up handfuls of grass and daisies--that opened wide their innocent eyes--as I fought my awful sense of oppression and desolation and bereavement. Yet what was all this compared to the agony I have suffered since, to the torment of my soul that increases daily? I never thought of death; suicide had no place in my mind. I wanted life, life in its fullest capacity of love and joy and happiness--furious and all-devouring--life that would use to the uttermost my superabundant energies. That is not spleen. Spleen follows upon it; it is the mental, moral and physical exhaustion that is the inevitable sequence to such a crisis. * * * * * One day as I slept, worn out by this reaction, in the laurel wood of the Villa, rolled up like a hedgehog in a heap of dry leaves, two of my comrades woke me. “Now then, Silenus, get up and come to Naples. We’re off.”